Broadcast media has, for decades, been the advertising media of choice for most companies. However, between the proliferation of cable TV and the Internet, audiences are fragmenting. Each year, broadcast television and related conventional broadcast media reach a smaller and smaller fraction of the total target audience for any given market segment. The explosion of the internet has grown to the point that there are now hundreds or thousands of terrestrial radio stations, and hundreds of internet only radio stations, streaming their content onto the internet everyday.
As broadband and fast wireless internet access becomes ubiquitous, the demand for online audio and video rich content increases similarly. Rich media content, including rich advertising or other information, provides an opportunity for advertisers and others to reach a significant share of the target market that has drifted away from broadcast television. Internet-based rich media incorporates the high impact and retention properties of TV and radio broadcasts, combined with the captive audience and individualized nature of the personal computer, or PC. By inserting targeted rich content into other streaming media, advertisements and other selected information can be easily and effectively provided to those most likely to be interested in the message presented.
Prior efforts to provide targeted rich media have generally suffered from a number of limitations. In general, prior art solutions have operated only with streaming audio, rather than multiple media (such as audio and video combined.) A typical prior art configuration for streaming includes some type of automation system (a system that plays a list of tracks) which plays the music and advertisements for the radio station. The output of this automation system is often an analog signal, which is connected to the audio input of a sound card on a machine which acts as an encoder. The encoder then compresses the audio and outputs compressed packets to a server, from which the compressed packets are distributed over the internet. Clients connect to the server and listen to the broadcast. In this original architecture, broadcasters would either host their own servers, or would collocate the servers at a high quality Internet Service Provider (ISP) in order to provide the bandwidth needed to service the users. The clients were generally PC's which have software for playing streaming media.
More recently, the need to use bandwidth more efficiently, and to improve performance, has led to the development of hosting providers, often referred to as Content Delivery Networks (CDN's), with servers located at the edge of the network. In such an arrangement, the hosting providers have servers spread throughout the United States and throughout the world. The signal is typically broadcast as a multicast signal over a backbone to the servers which are located near the edge where the users connect. Typically, the broadcast is reconfigured as a unicast stream at that point, and the users connect to the unicast servers. Typical hosting providers of this type include Qwest, Akamai, IBeam, and Enron, as examples.
Recently, wireless internet connections capable of handling streaming media have been introduced, although the data rates for such devices remain limited at present. Broadcasts over wireless connections are typically two-way and connection oriented, rather than multi-cast connections.
Typical prior art clients for streaming media are primarily PC's, but may also be Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's), some cell phones, network-connected stereo systems, and network connected car radio devices.
In the past, a variety of techniques have been proposed for inserting advertisements into streaming media. In conventional internet broadcasts, the insertion system relies on signals from the automation system to advise when a break will occur in the streaming media of the broadcast. That information, although it does not occur at precise intervals, is typically timetagged and tied to the media stream—for example, in a live radio broadcast, the disc jockey is given a range during which he is to go to a commercial break, but that actual choice of exactly when within that range is up to him. Once he decides, the automation system generates a time-tagged signal which can be recognized by other external devices. The insertion system typically detects the signal from the automation system and responds to it by first deciding what advertisement to insert and then implementing the actual insertion. However, many conventional insertion systems typically insert the advertisement prior to the encoder. This causes all clients to receive the same advertisement, which limits the utility of the insertion process because the advertisements are not targeted, or correlated to the interests of the listener.
In another prior art technique, the advertisements are inserted into the streaming media servers at the point at which the multicast signal is received, but before the edge servers rebroadcast the streaming media to the clients. This arrangement is typically implemented as a plug-in for the streaming media edge server. This approach offers only limited targeting in that every listener associated with a single edge server receives the same advertisement—or what is roughly geographic location based targeting.
A further prior art technique involves insertion of the advertisement at the client itself. In this case, special client software is typically required to be resident on the client machine, and advertisements are typically “trickled down” to the client (downloaded onto the client in the background using limited bandwidth) and cached at the client itself. Then, when an ad insertion signal is detected, the ad is pulled from the client cache and inserted locally. This technique creates numerous limitations, not the least of which is the use of client storage as well as the security risk associated with storing the inserted content locally at the client.
As a result, there has been a need for an information insertion technique which allows user-specific targeting, provides for good security of the content without requiring local caching, offers ease of use and maintenance, and does not require special client-side downloads.